Legit/credible Big Five personality testing

June 27, 2023 1:57 PM

I just read a blog post by The Wrong Kind of Cheese about, among other things, “the Big Five personality traits” in the Five-Factor Model of Personality (also called The Big Five Model/CANOE or OCEAN). TWKoC said "I did a self-test at BigFive-Test.com (having searched for a free test, I picked one at random)" and that made me curious: is there an online Big Five traits test that is particularly credible or legitimate?

I'd especially want one where the test has been normed and validated as a proper analytical instrument and where there's some guarantee about the privacy of my data. I might be willing to pay for this but don't have a good sense of what the price ought to be.

posted by brainwane to Health & Fitness (5 answers total)

Best answer: You want the NEO PI-R, a 240-item questionnaire that gives you a score for all five traits. I use it for my work. Some cursory googling hasn’t turned up the original when I’ve looked for it (when away from my hard copy), but I’m sure it’s out there somewhere.
posted by 8603 at 3:11 PM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: If the NEO PI-R is indeed what you want, I found it here.
posted by unknowncommand at 4:41 PM on June 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

Best answer: The IPIP-NEO tests at that link are probably credible and legitimate, as they are made by an academic, but just to be clear, he says: "The IPIP-NEO is not equivalent to the commercial inventory on which it is based, the NEO PI-R®"
posted by whatnotever at 6:54 PM on June 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Yeah IPIP is the standard “open” one, though bootleg PDFs of the NEO PI-R are out there. IPIP is also available on openpsychometrics.org.
posted by supercres at 11:23 PM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hee, brainwane, thanks for reading my blog post! I wrote it last-minute on Sunday night to help promote a podcast I was on, but as anyone who's read my usually enormous comments on MetaFilter (and my usually 3000+ word blog posts on my site), short isn't my style. I appreciate you asking the question here, because these answers will be great if I do an end-of-year "revisit" post.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 12:53 AM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]